An analyst at Lazard Capital is telling VentureBeat that early sales indicators on the newest World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria, are below expectations. The firm estimates 600-700k copies of the expansion sold at retail since its launch on Tuesday, down a whopping 60 percent from the previous expansion. VentureBeat notes that this estimate probably doesn't take into account digital downloads of the expansion.

Lazard Capital analyst Atul Bagga said that digitally distributed copies probably won't compensate for the estimated 60 percent drop in retail physical sales from the 2010 release of Cataclysm, which sold 3.3 million copies in its first 24 hours of release. The 2008 release of the world of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, sold 2.8 million copies in its first day of release, while the 2007 release of The Burning Crusade saw 2.4 million in sales.

Some of this could be due to the popular MMORPG's steady decline in subscribers. At its highpoint in 2010 World of Warcraft had 12 million active subscribers, but those numbers have been dropping: last month the game had tumbled to 9.1 million.

Comments

It seems that WOW is the cool thing to hate on now- even moreso than Call of Duty. Suddenly, the game is not only the worst thing out there now, but it was never good in the first place. Gotta love the internet.

I did notice that I had no issues logging in to the game the first day of the expansion- which has usually been subject to long queues the first week previous ones came out (Cataclysm was the worst for my server). The new zones were still chock-full of players, though, and panda people were all over the cities.

Also, they were pushing the digital version of this game very hard. There were buttons all over your account, login, and character screens that would let you upgrade to a Panaria account immediately. This convenience is likely to have resulted in more digital downloads than previous expansions.

The game also patched to the Pandaria login screen, complete with cinematic, regardless of your account status. I don't remember this happening with prior expansions (memory is admittedly a bit fuzzy on this).

I purchased a boxed copy (archaic, but I like having my set of WOW boxes on my shelf), but had no need to even place the game DVDs into my drive- all that I had to do was enter the serial # on my account screen and play. I think the entire expansion was already on my machine, and I was only locked out of the content.

While it seems that the internet is cheering the "death of WOW", I would chalk it up to the fact that this type of game is past it's peak. Everquest is still around, so I am afraid the internet haters are going to have to endure many more years of WoW "ruining" games.

Hardly the death of WoW. At this point the only thing that can kill WoW is WoW. I will admit that I lost interest around the time of Cata. But nothing that I have seen or heard has rekindled any feelings of returning. At this point I have moved onto other games (Guild Wars 2 being a primary one) and I don't intend to go back. I've had my fill of World of Warcrack, and I would rather not relapse considering that your choices are wash and rinse pvp, insane schedules for raiding, or running into people on RP realms who are basically saying up front 'Hey, I'm secretly a dragon, shhhhh'.

Also, pandas. Nothing personal, but I don't like species that require us to manage them for them to survive. Seems counter productive to evolution and all. Now make Murlocs into a palayable race and I might just come back. But as it is, I can play a cat person, plant person, human, gnome, or Super Viking in GW2. So yeah. My 2 cents.

"If you really want to enslave people, tell them you are going to give them Total Freedom." - L. Ron Hubbard

Panda can reproduce quite fine without humans, thank you very much. They don't have problem making kids like the myth says. The destruction of their lands coupled with the lack of knowledge of how to breed them in captivity has resulted in a sudden dramatic drop in their population, but now that we've figured numerous ways of making them do the hanky-panky, the specie is expected to be safe, at least in captivity (and would be in the wild as well if their bamboo forests were left alone.)

Until numbers that do account for digital are out, I remain skeptical. Unless you're getting the collector's edition, the box is a formality. Even an inconvenience when you have to type in the key - it's all registered automatically when you buy through Battle.net. The content gets patched in even if you don't buy it (you just can't access it). After not even having the option the first time around, they've pushed the digital sales harder and harder each time.

Take for consideration how LONG it took to make those games. Over 10 years for sequels to two great games; not to mention having to wait for the rest of starcraft 2. Maybe a little less time on WOW and these games would have come out sooner.

I will say that StarCraft 2 was a damn good game by itself, as far as the single player campaign is concerned.

However, I will also say that the longevity of the game relies on online content, much of which is churned out by the online community. I'll agree with the statement that it wasn't nearly as good as it could have been in the sense that it didn't display nearly enough originality to dissuade players from coming up with more entertaining alternatives, particularly when, as Jedi pointed out, it was on the backburner for so long.

I wouldn't mind seeing the game lose a few million more subscribers just to humble Blizzard even a little bit.

Mists of Pandaria is a lot of eye candy without any real meat; It's the same old reheated slop we've been served up since the end of Wrath of the Lich King, and it'd be nice if Blizzard actually realised this and tried to step up their game a bit.